Kitabı oku: «The Heart of Canyon Pass», sayfa 11
“What’s eatin’ on you, Smithy?” demanded Colorado Brown.
“Up in Tolley’s. I was just in there. I heard Tolley and Tom Hicks and some others of his gang talkin’. I couldn’t help hearin’ what was said, and when I went for ’em this – this is what I got.”
He almost choked on the words. Joe Hurley rose up as though a slow spring uncoiled beneath him.
“What did they say, Smithy?” he asked, and the tone of his voice seemed to quell all other sounds.
“Why, the skunks!” cried Smithy, “they said Nell Blossom shot Dick the Devil last spring and flung him over the wall of the canyon into Runaway River.”
CHAPTER XXI – THE DRAMA OF A LIE
The tense silence that followed Smithy’s half-sobbing speech marked the poignancy of the moment and the utter stupefaction of his hearers. To all but Joe Hurley and Hunt such an accusation as this aimed at Nell Blossom was entirely unlooked for. If the crowd understood anything at all, they understood that Boss Tolley, if he had started the scandal, courted annihilation!
Indeed the first question fired at Smithy following his statement was:
“Why didn’t you fill ’em with lead, Smithy?”
“I didn’t have no gun,” replied the grocery clerk. “And Tom Hicks downed me before I could get at Tolley.”
“Did he say it, Smithy?” demanded Colorado Brown.
“’Twas him says he knows all about it. Says that Nell killed Dick Beckworth.”
They talked. But it was Joe Hurley who acted. He threw down the hand of cards he held.
“Mike,” he said to the Mexican, Miguel Santos, “you know I ain’t in the habit of betraying cold feet. But I got some business to tend to. Colorado,” he added to the proprietor, “I’ll settle when I come in again. I’m in a hurry.”
With the quickness of a cat he slipped through the crowd about the table and Smithy and shot for the door. But the parson was at his elbow before he could get through the portal.
“You’d better keep out of this, Willie,” Hurley said between his teeth. “There’s goin’ to be the devil to pay in a minute.”
“It is as much my business as it is yours, Joe,” said Hunt, in step with his long stride on the side-walk where they headed toward the Grub Stake. “And we must do something before those fellows back there wake up.”
“What?” was Joe’s startled ejaculation.
“That stupid Smithy has started something. Some of those fellows will be out after us in a minute, and if they get to the Grub Stake before we straighten things out, there will be trouble.”
“Trouble? Youbetcha there’ll be trouble! And you’d better keep out of it, Willie.”
“I mean to stop it,” said Hunt softly.
But Joe Hurley did not hear him. He turned abruptly and burst into the main entrance of the Grub Stake. It did not take Joe Hurley’s trained glance to see that something had happened here. Hunt sensed, too, that if there had already been trouble, more of the same kind was expected.
The girl who usually presided at the door – the girl who parked your gun if you wanted to play, or your spurs if you wanted to dance and gave you checks in return for them – had got out of the way. Several of the gaming tables were empty. There was not a man standing in front of the bar, and Boss Tolley’s assistants behind the “rosewood” had “stepped out.”
Hunt knew at first glance that some of the toughest men in the camp were gathered here – either about the remaining tables or with Boss Tolley at the far end of the bar by the door of his tiny office where the safes stood. That office, Joe had told the parson, was an arsenal. There was a bodyguard around the dive keeper of at least six men.
Joe Hurley saw that all this group was armed. A flash of the several men at the gaming tables assured the mining man that they might be neutral, save perhaps the dealers for the house. But he realized that Tolley’s gang was primed for mischief. It was a wonder that Smithy, the poor fool, had got out of the place alive!
Hunt had pushed ahead of Joe the moment they stepped inside the door. They were both big men, and Joe’s advantage of height could not hide the parson’s bulk. In a flash, before a word was spoken, Joe took two long strides sideways and got behind the first table, which was empty. And he, by this act, left Hunt out of the line of any bullet aimed by the gang standing at the end of the bar at himself.
A gun had not yet been drawn, however, on either side. Nor had a word been spoken by either Tolley and his gang or by the two men who had entered so suddenly. Still, not a man in the barroom missed the significance of Joe Hurley’s strategic move.
Sam Tubbs, withered old scarecrow that he was, had been facing the door at a near-by table. It was evident that Steve Siebert, the returned desert rat, had been treating Tubbs to more liquor than was good for him. But Sam had some wit left.
Joe’s action forecast the popping of guns – instantly! Sam had seen too many such brawls to play the part of “innocent bystander” if he could help it. He let his feet slide out from under him, shot down in the chair on the small of his back, and passed out of sight under the table with all the celerity of an imp in a pantomime.
Steve Siebert, however, did not even remove his pipe from his lips, but wheeled in his chair and glared from Joe to Tolley and his bodyguard. The old man swung a heavy, old-style six-gun low on his hip. But he did not touch it – then.
Joe’s attitude was as wary as that of a puma about to spring. He crouched. By one quick motion he could overturn the table, drop behind it, and use it as a bulwark. But he must move quickly enough to escape, perhaps, seven bullets from as many guns.
It was Joe Hurley who first spoke.
“Tolley!” he said fiercely but clearly, “I warned you what I’d do if you repeated that lie about the girl. You remember, well enough, you hound! Stand out from those bootlickers of yours and take your medicine.”
The challenge got no response from Tolley but a grimace like that of a wolf in a trap. He did not make a motion to draw his own gun. He was too wise to do that in any event, for he knew he could not beat Joe to it! And then – what did he subsidize these gunmen for if not for such an emergency as this?
“Open your trap, you hound!” commanded Joe. “If you won’t fight, speak!”
“Wait a moment.”
The parson had actually not halted at all when he entered with Joe Hurley. He had merely slowed up. He was approaching Tolley and his men down the long length of the bar. But when he spoke Tom Hicks half drew his gun.
“Mr. Tolley,” Hunt said in the same clear but quiet voice, “will undoubtedly explain and apologize for what we understand he has said about the young woman in question. Come now, Mr. Tolley! you are ready to take back your words, aren’t you? You have no more proof, have you, of your – er – mis-statement than you had several weeks ago when you discussed the affair with Mr. Hurley in my hearing?”
“What are you butting in for?” returned Tolley with a threatening growl.
“For the sake of peace, Mr. Tolley,” explained the parson determinedly.
“Get back, Willie!” Joe ordered from the background.
He dared not draw his gun, for if he did Hunt would be right in the line of fire again. With a single motion Tom Hicks could get into action.
“You derned buttinsky!” spat out Tolley vengefully. “Mind what you are doing, or you’ll stop lead.”
“That will not make a lie the truth, Mr. Tolley,” rejoined Hunt, now squarely between the group of desperadoes and Joe Hurley’s position.
“You mean to say I’m a liar?” blustered Tolley.
“I mean to say that the story you have repeated about the young woman and the man you say has disappeared has no foundation in fact and that you have in your possession no proof to back your statement. If that is calling you a liar, Mr. Tolley, then consider yourself so called!”
There was a little stir among the listeners at the tables – a stir of approval, and one voice ejaculated:
“What’s it all about?”
Evidently not all of these men now present had been at hand when Smithy had taken offense at Tolley’s words earlier in the evening which precipitated this situation. Hunt, without raising his voice at all, continued:
“I take it that you have no new evidence of a crime having been committed? You did not see the man fall? You merely saw the young woman at the summit of the declivity? Later you recovered a saddle you recognized from the fallen rubbish? Am I right? Isn’t that the extent of your evidence?”
“Well! Look yere! I reckon I know what I am talkin’ about – ”
“But you do not talk about what you know,” interposed Hunt. “To my personal knowledge – and that of Mr. Hurley – the missing man was not buried under that heap of rubbish with his horse.”
“Then he went into the river!” cried Tolley.
Here Joe Hurley put in a very pungent word:
“And that might easily be true. If you found his horse and removed the saddle, you might have found the man, too, Tolley, and removed some of his harness.”
“What’s that?” was the startled demand.
“From the first,” Joe said sternly, “I suspected you, Tolley. Your dust won’t hide what you have done. You are altogether too sure the man is dead – after first reporting that you had heard from him in Denver.
“In fact, you are too anxious to cast suspicion on another person. Your conscience – if you have such a thing – is troubling you, Tolley. At least, your fears have made you try to invent a lie that doesn’t work out just the way you expected it to.”
“I’ll show you – ”
“You’ll show me nothing, Tolley!” retorted Hurley. “You’ll listen – and these other gentlemen. You got the man’s saddle. It is just as probable that you found his body, as well as that of the horse. And he was known to wear a money-belt around his waist. He was likewise known to be well-fixed when he left Canyon Pass. He’d been doing well here. You knew it, if anybody did. You confess that you rode after the man. And you confess that you got his saddle. Confess the rest of it, you dog. What else have you got in your safe that belonged to – ”
Boss Tolley threw caution to the winds at this juncture. Hurley’s scathing denunciation pricked to life in him such personal courage as he possessed. He flung himself forward with a howl of rage and whipped the gun from the holster at his hip.
“Get down, Willie!” shouted Hurley and flung the table on its edge with a crash, dropping behind it.
CHAPTER XXII – A FACE IN THE STORM
An interruption – a voice as hoarse as the croak of a vulture – rose above the din of other voices:
“Tolley! You other fellers! Put ’em up! H’ist ’em!”
Tolley halted – it seemed in midflight. Even the gun hand of Tom Hicks relaxed. From the other side of the room old Steve Siebert commanded the situation – and the group of desperate men. The black muzzle of his gun gaped like the mouth of a cannon. Hunt did not stand between him and Tolley’s crowd. The old man steadied the barrel of his weapon on the edge of the table behind which he sat and covered the bunch perfectly.
“H’ist ’em!” he said again, and as Tolley’s gun clattered to the floor and Hicks thrust back his weapon into his sheath, he added: “I don’t aim to mix in what ain’t my business, as a usual thing. But when I see seven skunks goin’ after two boys – an’ one o’ them a parson and not ironed a-tall – I reckon on takin’ a hand. Put ’em up!”
The ruffians obeyed. Seven pairs of hands reached for the smoke-begrimed ceiling. Several startled faces appeared under the archway between the barroom and the dance hall. One was the desert-bitten countenance of Andy McCann. He would not have sat to drink in the same room with his one-time partner; but Steve Siebert’s voice had stung McCann to action. Steve saw him.
“Andy, you derned old rat!” Steve cried, “shut that office door and lock it. Then, just frisk them rustlers and remove their irons. There ain’t goin’ to be no shootin’. Whatever the row is, it’s goin’ to be settled plumb peaceful.”
McCann snarled at the other old pocket-hunter like a tiger cat; but he obeyed – and not without some enjoyment of the chagrin of Tolley and his gangsters.
“It takes us old sourdoughs to be slick,” he chuckled, when he had dumped an armful of guns on an empty table. “You boys ain’t dry behind the ears yet when it comes to shootin’ scrapes.”
“There ain’t goin’ to be no shootin’,” repeated Steve Siebert. “Not ’nless them fellers start it with their mouths,” and he grinned such a toothless grin that he almost lost his grip on the pipestem clamped in one corner of his mouth.
“Now, what’s it all about? What’s the row? What gal you talkin’ about? Who’s the feller that was killed? I’m sort o’ curious.”
Joe Hurley stood erect again. He laughed.
“Great saltpeter!” he exclaimed, “you certainly are a friend in need, old-timer.”
“Come on,” rejoined Steve. “Let’s have the pertic’lars.”
It was the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt who took upon himself the explanation.
“Nell Blossom!” cried Steve. “That leetle songbird? You mean to say all this row is over her?”
“Mr. Tolley has made the statement that Miss Blossom was the cause of this Beckworth’s death. His horse went over the cliff into the canyon. Whether or not the man went with it – ”
“He did!” cried Andy McCann, smiting his thigh resoundingly with his palm. “By gravy! Is that what’s eatin’ all you fellers?”
“Say! Who’s runnin’ this court, I’d like to know?” demanded Steve Siebert angrily.
“Aw, shut up – you old lizard,” said McCann, flaming at him. “’Tain’t no court. It ain’t nothin’ like it. Put up your gun. It’s all off. Dick the Devil ain’t dead at all. At least he wasn’t killed that time he went over the cliff. He’s Dick the Devil sure ’nough, and he’s got more luck than a hanged man.”
“Just what do you mean?” Hunt asked.
“Why, we seen him – me and that old rat sittin’ there with his gun, makin’ goo-goo eyes. Sure! And me and him pulled Dick out of the river. He went clean over his horse’s head and landed in the river – same’s a bird. He might have been drowned if me and that ground owl there hadn’t got him out. But he never said one word about Nell Blossom bein’ with him or havin’ anything to do with his comin’ down that cliff. No, sir!”
“Nary a word,” agreed the surprised Siebert. “Nary a word.”
“What – what became of him?” stammered Hunt, a great weight lifted from his heart.
“He went along with me to the edge of the desert,” said Siebert slowly. “He dried out at my fire that night. Next morning he lit out to hit the Lamberton trail. That’s all I know about Dick.”
“And it’s more than I knowed,” grunted Andy McCann. “That old rat there might have garroted Dick for his money. But it sure wasn’t Nell Blossom that croaked Dick the Devil – if he’s dead at all.”
Here Hunt stepped between the two old prospectors. It looked as though somebody had to separate them or there might have been a shooting, after all!
But it was Joe Hurley who had the last word. He set up the overturned table and walked over to the bar.
“To show that there’s no hard feelings,” he drawled, “this’ll be on me. Get busy, Tolley, on the right side of this bar. And hereafter, you think twice before you say anything you’re not dead sure of about Nell Blossom. Somebody’d better drag Sam Tubbs out from under that table. He don’t want to miss this.”
There sounded a sudden rush of heavily shod feet outside the barroom door. As Hunt had expected, an angry crowd from Colorado Brown’s burst in.
“Just in season, boys,” Hurley continued. “All a mistake about our Nell. Tolley just proved himself to be as careless with the truth as he always is. Isn’t that so, Tolley?”
Tolley grunted.
The winter weather forecast by the return of Steve Siebert and Andy McCann from the desert held off the next morning when Betty Hunt and Nell started on their usual ride into the hills.
Nell had heard a garbled report but few of the particulars of the incident which the night before had threatened bloodshed at the Grub Stake. She knew that the parson had again done something that was sure to endear him to the Passonians in general. And his courageous act had been in her cause. But she had failed to learn of the disproval of Dick Beckworth’s reported death.
She said nothing to Betty about the incident. She had begun to shrink from discussing the rougher side of the life of Canyon Pass with the parson’s sister. As Joe Hurley would have expressed it, Nell Blossom was becoming “right gentled” through her association with Betty Hunt.
Betty herself, in Nell’s company, managed to put aside those more serious thoughts and anxieties of mind that ruffled her natural composure at other times. Since the day, weeks before, when she had been forced to wreck Joe Hurley’s hope of happiness, the cloud of despondency that overshadowed her life seemed at times greater than she could live under.
Nor could the Eastern girl put aside such thoughts of the Westerner as at first amazed and startled, then revealed to the honest soul of Betty Hunt that the unfortunate circumstance in her past life that made it impossible for her to make Joe happy, likewise barred her own heart from happiness.
Wicked as her strict upbringing made the fact seem, she had to admit that she had fallen under the spell of Joe Hurley’s generous character, that she loved him. She could not deny this discovery, although it filled her mind with confusion. Wedded to a man she hated and in love with a man she could not wed!
In any event, this was a secret – like the other that so disturbed her – which under no circumstances could she confide to either her brother or any friend. At first she felt the discovery a degrading one. Brought up as she had been under the grim puritanism of her Aunt Prudence Mason, the idea of a married woman admitting that she loved a man other than the one she was married to was a sin. The idea of divorce was as foreign to her religious training as was the thought of fratricide.
She was cheerful on the surface at least when she and Nell rode out of Canyon Pass and through the East Fork. They climbed the canyon wall on that side by a tortuous path on which only a burro or a very sure-footed pony was safe. It was Nell, when they were once on the summit, who discovered the threat of a weather change.
The air was very keen. Many of the bushes by the way had shriveled during the night as though before a furnace blast.
“Black frost,” said the younger girl. “Old Steve and Andy know their little book. Sam says Steve told him there was a blizzard coming. We won’t ride far to-day, Betty.”
“A blizzard? Only fancy,” murmured the Eastern girl.
She was not much impressed. She had no experience – even of New England winter storms – to enable her to judge the nature of a storm in these Western mountains.
But Nell should have known better than to lead the way into a gulch which quite shut them in from sight of the surrounding country. A blizzard is a chancy thing; and often the first storm of a Western winter is the worst of all.
They rode to a spring at which deer drank; they saw many tracks, but there were none of the pretty creatures in sight. Birds fluttered through the chaparral with strange cries, and the rabbits ran back and forth as though much disturbed by domestic happenings.
“I never saw them jacks so queer acting,” said Nell thoughtfully. “We’d better ride home, Betty.”
“Why?” asked the other girl gayly. “You are not afraid they will attack us, are you?”
“Not that,” and the Western-born young woman smiled. “But there’s something comin’, I reckon – just as Steve and Andy say.”
Before they rode up out of the gulch they heard something slashing like a multitude of knives through the dead leaves overhead. When they rode out into the open they beheld the thick cloud that had almost reached the zenith, and out of that cloud came not snow, but ice!
Fine particles of the sharpest crystal were driven in a thick haze through the singing air. Nell instantly whipped off her neckcloth and tied it across her nose and mouth, warning Betty to follow her example.
“Get this in your lungs, Betty, and you’ll have pneumonia as sure as sure!” she shouted.
Frightened, they urged their ponies on to the beginning of the rough path down the canyon wall. Although they were soon somewhat sheltered from the driving ice-storm there were bare places where the two girls suffered the full force of the gale.
“I know a place!” cried Nell in a muffled voice. “We got to hole up till this stops. Come on!”
It had grown dark of a sudden. Nell pulled her pony off the path, and he picked his way daintily to a cavity in the wall. Here an overhanging rock offered some shelter. At least, the girls were out of the steady beat of the storm.
They dismounted and got behind the ponies, between their warm bodies and the rock itself. If Betty was the more frightened of the two, she showed it no more than did Nell Blossom.
The air became thicker and the whine of the wind rose to a shriek which all but drowned their voices when they tried to communicate with each other. It was such a manifestation of the storm king as Betty Hunt had never seen before.
They were but a little way off the path. Suddenly both girls, in spite of the wind, heard the clatter of shod hoofs. Another horse was coming down the path. In a moment they dimly saw the looming figure of a man leading the animal.
“Who is it?” gasped Betty, but if Nell heard the question she did not answer.
Nell clutched Betty’s wrist for silence. The girls stared at the man beating his way downward. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, but they could see the long, black, curling hair flowing from beneath it. He turned his face toward them, and Betty beheld the keen face and heavy mustache of the stranger she had seen hiding from the sheriff and his posse weeks before near the trail to Hoskins!
The man progressed so slowly, and he was so near, that the Eastern girl could study his features now with more certainty. There was something in the contour of his face that reminded her of Andy Wilkenson!
Could it be he? Was it possible that this fugitive – the man the officers had accused of a crime – was the debonair Andy who had so enthralled her girlish mind and heart back there at Grandhampton Hall?
She had not forgotten Wilkenson’s observations about Crescent City. Betty had never ceased to fear that he might appear to her in this part of the great West. But here – now – and in this dramatic manner?
Much shaken, she turned to look at Nell Blossom. She suddenly realized that the other girl was sagging against her shoulder very strangely. She glanced down into Nell’s muffled face.
The younger girl’s eyes were closed. She was as pallid as death itself. Nell Blossom had fainted!
